JUGGLE-BANDHI

Paisa vasool

Jug Suraiya
04 February 2010, 09:07 PM IST

Hotklix	Digg
Google Bookmarks	StumbleUpon
Reddit	Newsvine
Live Bookmarks	Technorati
Yahoo Bookmarks	Blogmarks
Del.icio.us	ApnaCircle

Jugular Vein Inflation? Forget it. Never mind that prices - particularly food prices - have gone not just through the roof but through all future roof rights on that benighted roof. Never mind that onions have become the new pearls, tomatoes the new rubies, and potatoes the new diamonds. Never mind that unscrupulous racketeers are busy adulterating arhar dal with gold dust, and parmal rice with platinum filings. Never mind all that irrelevant stuff. There is still one product - some would say the most important product of this country - which has beaten inflation not only hands down but arms, legs and feet down as well.

A couple of weeks ago i spotted an advertising hoarding announcing this product. Which was on sale for one paisa. One whatdidhesay? Paisa? What's that? An entire generation of Indians has grown up for whom a paisa is not even a race memory. They've never known of its existence, and on encountering the word might well surmise it to mean some new kind of pasta, like penne, but different, or maybe that ancient old Guru Dutt movie, Pyasa, but misspelt.

I don't blame them. I'm pretty ancient, at least as ancient as Pyasa, and i can barely remember the paisa, the one-hundredth unit of a rupee. I can't remember when i last saw one, let alone trying to buy something with one. They probably stopped making the paisa years ago, when some boffin in the sarkari mint figured out that the copper used in the making of the coin was probably worth several times more than the paisa was.

And what was the paisa worth, in terms of purchasing power? What could you buy with it, what could you buy with one single paisa? Absolute zilch, so far as i could make out. Presumably, just presumably mind, you might on a good day and if the wind was blowing in the right direction induce someone to sell you a matchstick for one paisa. One matchstick. With no matchbox to go with it. So what were you going to do with your one matchstick? How were you going to light it? You could of course ask to borrow someone else's matchbox, perhaps that of the person who sold you the one matchstick. But this might make you seem like a cheapskate. Like you were the sort of person who'd borrow someone else's comb to comb your own hair with, or someone else's hanky you blow your nose into and then return to the person you'd borrowed it from. Icky.

Of course you could use your single matchstick to pick your teeth with. But if all you could afford to buy was one matchstick, the chances were pretty slim that you'd have anything between your teeth which needed picking out anyway.

I was still trying to digest this (food prices being what they are, my digestive system has grown cobwebs) when i saw another advertising hoarding. And this one was selling the same product as the first hoarding but was selling it for half a paisa. Half a paisa? How the heck did you halve a paisa? With a cleaver? By biting it between your teeth? And what could a halved paisa fetch you?

Half a single matchstick? And how would the matchstick be halved? Vertically or horizontally? In either case it would be pretty useless for anything. Even for picking teeth.

So what was this product that these hoardings were touting at one paisa and half a paisa respectively? Yes, the product in question was our GDP: our Greatest Domestic Product. Talk. The hoardings were advertising talk time on a cellphone service at one paisa per second and half a paisa per second.

It figures. All pricing is a question of demand and supply. Food is in great demand and in short supply, so food prices are high. Talk is in great supply and in short demand, so the price of talk is low. And where did we learn to talk so much? From our netas of course: We shall eradicate poverty, we shall control inflation, we shall grow at 7.5 per cent this year, we shall blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Never mind passing the buck. That's how we pass the buk-buk.

23 Comments | Comments are closed. Rated

Related Blog Posts

The unaffordable thing called LIFE!

Mumbai and 370

Sab banenge crorepati?

Subscribe to comments on this Post Comments:

Sort by: Oldest | Newest | Recommended (23) | Most Discussed | Author´s Responses (1)

Ziauddin Shafi says:

February 04,2010 at 10:55 PM IST

The satirist poet Saghar Khayyami had once said: Ghoday ki leedh dhaniye main Baniye milayenge, woh din nahin hai door jab hum hinhina yenge - Traders would mix horse shit with cumin powder, that day is not far off when we would laugh like a horse! Recently, the 3 Idiot middle class mom had rued that Paneer had become so precious that it to be is found only at the jewelers in very small bags! And we talk of self sufficiency in food production and let the food grains rot in the yards - for distributing it would harm the interests of the Baniya.

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
« September 2010
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30

Today

JUGGLE-BANDHI

Paisa vasool

Recent Posts

Recent Posts

Most Read

Most Commented

Top Rated